A competitive AL-FEC framework over mobile multicast delivery

Reliability control is a key concern on the evolution of real-time mobile multicast services. To this direction the use of forward error correction (FEC) on the application layer is widely adopted in several mobile multicast standards. FEC is a feedback free error control method where the transmitter introduces in advance redundant information to enable receivers recovering data erasures. On multicast delivery and especially on the time constrained streaming delivery where retransmission-based error recovery methods are not feasible, the most suitable error control method is the use of application layer forward error correction (AL-FEC) codes. In this work, we introduce a novel AL-FEC deployment policy over mobile multicast standards utilizing online algorithms. We aim on the efficient application of AL-FEC protection with RaptorQ codes over multicast streaming delivery in the context of competitive analysis. We provide a competitiveness analysis model of AL-FEC application over mobile multicast real-time environments and we introduce an innovative online algorithm adjusting the introduced redundancy of AL-FEC protection according to the FEC encoding parameters in order to satisfy the individual constraints of a multicast streaming delivery.